2013 Letter to Obama asking him not to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument and the Secession Petitions

                                                                                                May 15, 2013

                                                                                                Edward H. Sebesta

                                                                                                esebesta@tx.rr.com

President Barack H. Obama

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Hon. President Obama:

As widely reported in the press, nearly a million people had signed secession petitions at the whitehouse.gov website by December 10, 2012.  By their very definition these petitions are a complete rejection of American ideals and they seek to damage the country.  Why are these petitions not viewed as offensive or odious?

Further secessionism has made inroads to mainstream politics. In Minnesota at the 2010 2^nd Congressional District Republican convention a resolution that a state had a right to secede came within two votes of passage, “but only after Sutton, who was functioning as the convention’s chair, reminded his fellow Republicans that opposition to secession by states was a founding Republican principle in the late 1850s.”[1] However, about two weeks later the Minnesota 5^th Congressional District Republican convention did pass a resolution both supporting nullification and endorsing “secession as options to enforce state sovereignty.”[2]

Perhaps because they had listened too many times to the Charlie Daniels Band song, “The South is Gonna Do It Again,” in 2009 the Georgia State Senate passed resolution SR632, conditionally calling for both nullification and secession by a margin of 43-1.[3] Tennessee Congressional Rep. Zach Wamp brought up secession as a response to health care legislation in 2010.[4] Former Vice-Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin spoke to the Alaska Independence party which wishes that Alaska secede from the Union.[5]

Then there is the now widely known statement of Texas Governor Rick Perry speaking before a Tea party group in Texas in 2009 saying, “When we came into the Union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that,” and “We’ve got a great Union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that?”[6]

Ron Paul went to a secession convention in Charleston, South Carolina held by the Ludwig von Mises Institute (www.mises.org) in 1995 where he was a speaker.[7] He has been heavily involved with the pro-secession Ludwig von Mises Institute over the years.

Why is secession not odious?

I think the answer is obvious to even the most casual observer. At the federal, state, and local level Confederate secessionists who sought to destroy the United States of America are honored and glorified with monuments and symbols. This normalizes and makes the idea of secession to break up the United States morally acceptable.

We believe that a president of the United States of America should not send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument as it glorifies both a violent rejection of the United States and normalizes secession.

Earlier we have written you about other practices by the federal government that normalize secession: Allowing the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) to get involved with the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps; Allowing the United Daughters of the Confederacy to give awards to cadets at the U.S. Military academies named after treasonous secessionists; and allowing the SCV to be part of the Federal Combined Campaign.

I ask you to stop normalizing secession by ending the Presidential practice of sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument on Memorial Day or any day and to end any federal activities that allow the SCV and UDC to spread their secessionist message to our military.

                                                                                    Regards,

                                                                                    Edward H. Sebesta

---

[1] Lori Sturdevant, “Party of Lincoln flirts with a house-divided resolution,” Star Tribune, March 30, 2010, online.

[2] Lori Sturdevant, “Secession gaining fans in MN GOP,” Star Tribune, April 12, 2010. Online.

[3] Jay Bookman, “Georgia Senate threatens dismantling of USA,” Atlanta Constitution Journal, April 16, 2009, http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2009/04/16/georgia-senate-threatens-dismantling-of-usa/.

[4] Emi Kolawole, “Tennessee Rep. Zach Wamp talks of secession,” Washington Post, July 24, 2010. Online

[5] Jon Swaine, The Telegraph (UK), Sept. 2, 2008, online; Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert, “Meet Sarah Palin’s right-wing pals,” http://news.salon.com/2008/10/10/palin_chryson Online.

[6] James McKinley, jr., “Texas Governor’s Secession Talk Stirs Furor,” New York Times, April 18, 2009, online.

[7] Ludwig von Mises flyer, “Secession!,” Ludwig von Mises Institute, post marked Feb. 27, 1995. 

Obama and the secession petitions

With all these secession petitions that Obama will be responding to, I hope Obama will reconsider the wisdom to sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument dedicated to those who fought for secession.

Obama's sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument helps normalize secession.

2012 Letter to Obama

                                                                                                        May 24, 2012

President Barack H. Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama:

During your Presidency, you have annually sent Presidential wreathes to the Arlington Confederate monument on Memorial Day. I am writing to ask you to stop this practice. The United Daughters of the Confederacy regularly uses photographs of your  wreathes in its magazine accompanying appeals to celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis and to honor Confederate soldiers at an annual commemoration in Arlington. A Presidential wreath implicitly sanctions this event and legitimates the Confederacy and its leader. Please do not send a Presidential wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument in 2012.

Until the administration of President George H. W. Bush, American presidents had sent a wreath to the Confederate memorial on Jefferson Davis’s birthday: President Bush ended this practice, instead sending a wreath on Memorial Day. Although the wreath is no longer sent on Davis’s birthday (3rd June), Memorial Day is close enough such that the wreath will likely still be on the Arlington Confederate monument and it can be used to celebrate Davis’s birthday, as seen in the UDC Magazine in 2010 and 2011 (I enclose copies of the relevant pages).

When the President of the Unites States sends a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument, the prestige of the monument is enhanced. It augments the celebration of Jefferson Davis and justifies his beliefs and those of the Confederate States he led. I urge you to end this practice. Jefferson Davis was a white supremacist and fiercely pro-slavery. In Augusta, Maine, in 1858, for example, Davis praised his audience for remaining racially pure, in contrast to Latin Americans who he said were racially mixed and incapable of self-government.[1] Davis opposed efforts to ban slavery in the Oregon territory in 1848 and, in a lengthy Senate speech, described the inhabitants of Oregon and the newly acquired territories from Mexico as “mongrels of the Spanish and Indian races, inheriting from both the characteristics, pertinacity, treachery, and revenge.” [2] He spoke out and voted against the African Squadron to suppress the transatlantic slave trade.[3]  He advised the Mississippi legislature in 1858 to secede if an abolitionist was elected president and to prepare by stocking up arms.[4] When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Davis denounced it as the “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man” which he felt was “a measure by which several millions of human beings of an inferior race, peaceful and contented laborers in their sphere, are doomed to extermination.”[5] He advocated that captured African American soldiers not be treated as prisoners of war, nor should their officers.[6]

After the Civil War, Davis’s book, “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government,” published in 1881, described African Americans as racially inferior, argued that emancipation was a mistake, and claimed it was an outrage that African Americans were allowed on juries and in state legislatures. Davis died never regretting his lifelong fight for slavery, nor altering his views regarding African Americans.

A President of the United States should not be contributing to the celebration of Jefferson Davis in any way, shape, or form. The annual sending of a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument by Presidents of the United States contributes in a prominent way to perpetuating the celebration of Jefferson Davis. I request that you no longer aid the celebration of Jefferson Davis. Please do not send a Presidential wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument in 2012.

 

                                                                    Sincerely Yours,

 

                                                                    Edward H. Sebesta

---

[1] Davis, Jefferson, “Speech of Jefferson Davis at the Portland Convention,” Vol. 3 pages, 284-88, and “Speech of Jefferson Davis at State Fair at Augusta, Me. ,” from the Eastern Argus, Sept. 29, 1858, reprinted Vol. 3, pages 312-314,  both from “Jefferson Davis: Constitutionalist, His Letters , papers, and Speeches,” editor Dunbar Rowland, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, 1923.

[2] Davis, Jefferson, Speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, July 12, 1848,  Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 30^th Congress, 1^st Session, pages 907-914.

[3] Congressional Globe, 31^st Congress, 2^nd Session, pages 307-309.

[4] Rowland, Dunbar, “Jefferson Davis Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches,” Vol. III, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, 1923, speech on pages 339-360, quotes on pages 356, 359.

[5] Dunbar Rowland, “Jefferson Davis to the Confederate Congress,” from Jefferson Davis Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches, 5, (Jackson: MS Dept. of Archives and History, 1923), 396-415. Also in the Journal of the Confederate Congress, 3, 58^th Cong., 2d sess., 1904, S. Doc. 234, Serial 4612, 13-14.

[6] Official records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion. / Series II - Volume 3: Proclamations, Appointments, etc. of President Davis; State Department Correspondence with Diplomatic Agents,etc., page 142.

History News Network Runs 2009 Letter to Obama for Memorial Day

History News Network, http://www.hnn.us/, has added the 2009 letter to Obama as an item for its Hot Topics listing for Memorial Day. You can see it on the Memorial Day page here,
http://hnn.us/articles/12140.html.

Unfortunately they didn't run our 2010 or 2011 letter.

You can read all three letters by using the links on the side bar to the right of this blog.

There will be a 2012 letter to President Obama. We are thinking of taking up the topic of the massacre of African American troops.

Incidentally, I strongly recommend this essay by David W. Blight on the first Memorial Day. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/opinion/30blight.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all.

Film Maker Zade Darwish co-signs letter

Zade Darwish, producer of the movie, "The Runaway," about a slave rebellion in Florida has co-signed the 2011 letter to President Obama.

You can view his website and see a short video on the movie at http://www.floridaslave.com/.

The 2011 Letter to the President and background information on it can be found through the links in the right side bar.

Co-signatures are coming in and we are ahead of where we were last year.

2011 Letter to President Barack Obama Asking Him to End UDC Awards Ceremonies at U.S. Military Academies. UPDATE. This letter is mentioned in an article about UDC awards given at Universities.

The following is the letter that will be sent to President Obama May 1, 2011 with a list of co-signers. Note at the top of the side bar of this blog is a link to this posting of the letter and the background information for this letter. If you wish to be a co-signer email me. esebesta@tx.rr.com
May 1, 2011

Edward H. Sebesta esebesta@tx.rr.com

President Barack H. Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama:

I am writing this letter with two requests:

1. Do not send a wreath to Arlington Confederate monument on Memorial Day.

2. End the practice of allowing the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to distribute awards at U.S. Service academies and military academies that provide officers to the U.S. military.

By ending these two practices, the Office of the President can demonstrate its commitment to an egalitarian, democratic United States and challenge the growing political power of neo-Confederate ideology. In the pages that follow, I will outline how and why I believe the Office of the President should take these steps and stop honoring the slave-holding Confederate States of America, whose supporters, in groups like the UDC, continue to oppose civil rights and promote a discriminatory and erroneous understanding of U.S. history. Unfortunately, to date the Office of the Presidency has actively enabled neo-Confederacy by sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument, a monument that depicts scenes of white supremacy and African-American subservience. I urge that you end this practice.

Secondly, as one the oldest and most powerful neo-Confederate organizations, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) has a long history of opposition to the values of a multiracial democratic United States of America.[i] Since its formation in 1894, the UDC has consistently acclaimed the Ku Klux Klan, opposed civil rights, and challenged racial and social equality.[ii] These political opinions are not confined to the UDC’s past; they continue and yet the organization is permitted to issue eight annual awards at U.S. service academies:

* The Robert E. Lee Sabre at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York

* The Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury Award at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland

* The Lieutenant General Claire L. Chenault Award at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado

* The Admiral Raphael Semmes Award at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, New London, Connecticut

* The Matthew Fontaine Maury Award at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point, New York

* The Stonewall Jackson Award at the Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia

* The William Porcher DuBose Award at the Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina

* Wade Hampton Sabre award at the Citadel given by the South Carolina Division UDC.

Permission for the UDC to give these awards to U.S. servicemen and servicewomen must be discontinued. Their annual distribution continues to legitimate the Confederacy and, by appropriating the prestige of the United States military in exchange for small gifts, the UDC both honors themselves and the Confederate leaders who fought against the U.S. military to sustain slavery and white supremacy.

The UDC’s veneration of white supremacy is not just historical. In recent years the UDC has promoted the neo-Confederate Southern Partisan magazine, pro-Confederate books like So Good a Cause: A Decade of the Southern Partisan in which Richard M. Weaver refers to Chicago as an “evil flower,”[iii] Michael Andrew Grissom’s Southern By the Grace of God, which states slaves were well-treated servants, and lauds Thomas Dixon’s notorious, racist 1905 novel, The Clansman.[iv] Authors in UDC publications continue to correct what they state are American “misconceptions” about the horrors of slavery,[v] and promote anti-democratic, pro-secessionist bodies like the Abbeville Institute, [vi] an organization whose leaders are closely associated with the League of the South, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a ‘hate group.’ It is clear, therefore, that even in the 21st Century, members of the UDC continue its tradition of racism and opposition to equality, yet the United States military tacitly supports and enables this neo-Confederate ideology by allowing the UDC to award honors at U.S. Service academies and other military schools.

The toleration of this activity by the U.S. military reflects poor judgment. Future military officers of the Republic should not be given awards named after individuals who lead an insurrection against the United States to preserve slavery, by an organization dedicated to the glorification of this insurrection. Additionally, several of these awards are named after notorious racists.[vii] Raphael Semmes, for example, erected a tombstone in Mexico with the inscription “In memoriam of Abraham Lincoln, President of the late United States, who died of nigger on the brain, 1st January 1863,” and yet Semmes is honored with an award given to an exemplary cadet of the U.S. Coast Guard academy.

In summary, the UDC promotes a neo-Confederate ideology that challenges American democratic practices, praises and promotes racist books, and offers defenses of slavery. Consequently, in addition to ending the practice of sending a Presidential wreath to the Confederate Monument in Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day, I ask you to end the practice of the UDC granting awards at America’s service academies and end their involvement in the affairs of the United States Military. Rather than annually celebrating the Confederacy, the United States of America needs a national conversation about the Confederacy, the Civil War, the overthrow of Reconstruction and neo-Confederacy. With the start of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, 2011 would be an ideal time to begin such a discussion to acknowledge the historical truth about these issues. With a false understanding of the historical past we poison the future. Or, as the great W.E.B. Du Bois angrily explained in regards to the upcoming Civil War Centennial celebrations in 1960:

Thus we train generations of men who do not know the past, or believe a false picture of the past, to have no trustworthy guide for living and to stumble doggedly on, through mistake after mistake, to fatal ends. Our history becomes “lies agreed upon” and stark ignorance guides our future.[viii]

I would be happy to provide further documentation as you require.


Sincerely Yours,

Edward H. Sebesta

[i] The online publication, Black Commentator, has an article about some of the more contemporary UDC promotion of neo-Confederacy at (http://www.blackcommentator.com/274/274_clinton_udc.html). For more background on the UDC’s promotion of racism information is provided online at http://www.confederatepastpresent.org/ in conjunction with the Winter Institute at the University of Mississippi for both the Nader Period and the Modern Civil Rights Era, additionally a brief summary of the history of the racism of the UDC can be found at http://arlingtonconfederatemonument.blogspot.com/2011/02/united-daughters-of-confederacy-and.html.
[ii] Fannie Selph, The South in American Life and History, Nashville Chapters of United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1928, pp. 372-374, praised the KKK; for the Susan Lawrence book on the KKK see, No Author, “Memorial Fund to Honor Wilson Boosted by U.D.C,” Atlanta Constitution, 11/22/1924; in the UDC’s official publication, Southern Magazine, see Walter Henry Cook, “Secret Political Societies in the South During The Period of Reconstruction,” The Southern Magazine, pages 3-5, 42-43, Vol. III No. 1, July 1936, News Publishing Company, Wytheville, Virginia; for Mildred Rutherford’s address praising the KKK see, Mildred Rutherford, an address, “The Thirteen Periods of United States History,” delivered as UDC Historian General to the UDC convention, November 13, 1913, from a section titled, “The Humiliated South of The Reconstruction Period.” These articles can be found at http://www.confederatepastpresent.org/ a web site in conjunction with the Winter Institute.

For article attacking school integration see Bruce Dunstan, Jefferson Davis – The Man America Needs Today,” UDC Magazine, June 1958, pp. 19, 23, 26, 27; Attack on school integration at UDC convention see Gen. Sumter Lowry, UDC Magazine, serialized over two issues, February 1959 pp. 32, March 1959, pp. 15, 22, 24, a speech at a UDC convention. The complete text can be read in The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The ‘Great Truth’ about the ‘Lost Cause, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2010. The United Daughters of the Confederacy ran numerous articles attacking Civil Rights and school integration during the 1950s and many of these can be read at http://www.confederatepastpresent.org/.
[iii] Erath, Clara, “Confederate Notes,” page 11, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 58 No. 7, August, 1995.
[iv] Grissom, Mike, “The Mystery of John Hunt Cole,” pages 27-29, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 51 No. 9, September 1988.
[v] Lee, Dr. Walter W., III, “The African Slave Trade,” pages 18-19, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 52 No. 4, April 1989.
[vi] Erath, Clara, “Confederate Notes: The Value of Southern Tradition,” page 17, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 68 No. 7, August 2005.
[vii] Wade Hampton, for example, was the leader of the Red Shirts who conducted a violent and successful campaign to restore white supremacy in South Carolina ending the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction. Wade Hampton is a hero to the UDC South Carolina Division precisely because he restored white supremacy to South Carolina and overthrew Reconstruction. United Daughters of the Confederacy, South Carolina Division: Golden Anniversary 1896-1946, no author. The UDC South Carolina Division issued a publication with the cover, “United Daughters of the Confederacy, South Carolina Division: Golden Anniversary 1896-1946.” In it on page 13 is an article titled, “Oakley Park, Edgefield’s Red Shirt Shrine.” Oakley Park is an old Plantation house which the South Carolina UDC division had decided in October 1944 to restore. The importance of this house for restoration is stated in the article, “Oakley Park was the home of General Martin Witherspoon Gary, who with his Red Shirts, in 1876, did so much to restore white supremacy in South Carolina.” The article explains further that “The “Red Shirts” were largely ex-Confederate soldiers under the leadership of their one-time military commanders,” and that “Conditions were desperate! The Democrats were determined to get the government back into the hands of the white people.” The UDC article praises the success of the Red Shirts says that they “… accomplished the overthrow of that “blackest abomination” – The Radical Government of South Carolina.”

In the 21st century the UDC continues to promote the “Red Shirt Shrine,” the UDC run Oakley Park Museum in Edgefield, South Carolina. In the June/July 2001 issue of UDC Magazine, the cover illustration is a photo of the Oakley Park plantation house for an article in the issue about it.[vii] The UDC raised money for this museum in the 1940s and has promoted them as heroes over the years, including the aforementioned Wade Hampton Sabre award.

The racism of others for whom these awards are named is given online at http://arlingtonconfederatemonument.blogspot.com/2011/02/biographical-background-of-racism-of.html.
[viii] W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Lie of History as It Is Taught Today (The Civil War: The War to Preserve Slavery), February 15, 1960, from “W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader,” edited by Andrew Paschal, Collier Books edition, New York, 1993, pp. 115-120.

If you wish to be a co-signer email me.

UPDATE:  The Chronicles of Higher Education has mentioned this letter in an article about universities, including the U.S. Military academies which work with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The link is: http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/bowdoin-ends-confederate-heritage-award-like-many-still-offered-by-u-s-service-academies/106066

The the racism of the persons for whom the UDC names its awards to the U.S. Military service academy students

.
The following is about the racism of the individuals for whom the UDC names the awards that they give to the U.S. Military service academy students.

Wade Hampton, was the leader of the Red Shirts who conducted a violent and successful campaign to restore white supremacy in South Carolina ending the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction. Wade Hampton is a hero to the UDC South Carolina Division precisely because he restored white supremacy to South Carolina and overthrew Reconstruction.[i]

The UDC South Carolina Division issued a publication with the cover, “United Daughters of the Confederacy, South Carolina Division: Golden Anniversary 1896-1946.” In it on page 13 is an article titled, “Oakley Park, Edgefield’s Red Shirt Shrine.” Oakley Park is an old Plantation house which the South Carolina UDC division had decided in October 1944 to restore. The importance of this house for restoration is stated in the article, “Oakley Park was the home of General Martin Witherspoon Gary, who with his Red Shirts, in 1876, did so much to restore white supremacy in South Carolina.”

The article explains further:

The “Red Shirts” were largely ex-Confederate soldiers under the leadership of their one-time military commanders. Forbidden to organize into military companies and regarding the gray uniform of the Confederacy as inappropriate, the men arrayed themselves in red shirts and formed mounted bands which patrolled the State in the interest of the Democratic nominee for Governor, which was Hampton, against the Republican nominee, Chamberlain. “A white man’s government”, they said. Then followed a long struggle for control. The Republicans held the State House, and were sustained by United States troops. Conditions were desperate! The Democrats were determined to get the government back into the hands of the white people.

The Red Shirts, who gathered at Oakley Park and rode out from there were a great factor in achieving this, and in the election of Hampton in 1876, and thus was accomplished the overthrow of that “blackest abomination” – The Radical Government of South Carolina.”

In the 21st century the UDC continues to promote the “Red Shirt Shrine,” the UDC run Oakley Park Museum in Edgefield, South Carolina. In the June/July 2001 issue of UDC Magazine, the cover illustration is a photo of the Oakley Park plantation house for an article in the issue about it. .[i] The UDC raised money for this museum in the 1940s and has promoted them as heroes over the years, including the aforementioned Wade Hampton sabre award.

Raphael Semmes erected a tombstone in Mexico with the inscription “In memoriam of Abraham Lincoln, President of the late United States, who died of nigger on the brain, 1st January 1863,” is somehow honored with an award given to an exemplary cadet of the U.S. Coast Guard academy.

Professor Gerald Horne, in his book, “The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade,” discusses the obsessive racism of Semmes. Brazilian society displeased Semmes because of racial antipathies. Horne quotes Semmes in his rejection of post-war colonization of Brazil as follows:

‘The effete Portuguese race,’ he sputtered, ‘has been ingrafted [sic]upon a stupid, stolid Indian stock in that country … this might be a suitable field enough for the New England schoolma’am and carpet-bagger, but no Southern gentleman should think of mixing his blood or casting his lot with such a race of people.’

Horne explains that while Semmes, as a Confederate naval officer during the Civil War, was hosted and feted by Brazilian society he was obsessed with their racial composition. Horne writes:

He was disgusted with “amalgamation” in Brazil, thinking it provided a poor example for North America, as it was leading to “mongrel set of curs” that would “cover the whole land.” He was more pleased with South Africa where “the African has met the usual fate of the savage, when he comes in contact with civilized man. He had been thrust aside, and was only to be seen as a straggler and stranger in his native land.” As he saw it, “the inhabitants of the Cape Colony seemed to resemble our own people” in their penchant for white supremacy.

Horne also questions Semmes being considered a hero and writes:

The “damage done by Raphael Semmes to the commerce of the United States” amounted to “ten millions of dollars.” Yet despite this mayhem he inflicted on the U.S. during the course of his treasonous revolt, after the war his “statue” was placed prominently on “Mobile’s busiest thoroughfare, standing near the sea he so long loved and dominated.”[ii]

Following the defeat of the Confederacy, Matthew Fontaine Maury attempted to recreate the slave-era Old South in Mexico. As noted by Gaines M. Foster in his book, “Ghosts of the Confederacy,” Maury and his comrades planned to:

Bring with them a proportional number of “negro skilled laborers in agriculture” who would enter the country as “peons” – a concession that caused Maury to consider himself an abolitionist. Together, the best families and faithful peons would build a “New Virginia” in a part of Mexico that reminded Maury of the Valley of the Shenandoah.[iii]

Maury also worked at length for a scheme to colonize the Amazon basin of Brazil with African- American slaves. Maury’s contempt for Brazilians and his plans for this slave expansion are shown in these excerpts in a letter of instruction to Herndon who he sent to Brazil as a scout for his scheme:

Who shall people the Great Valley of this Mighty Amazon? Shall it be peopled with an imbecile and an indolent people or by a go ahead race that has energy and enterprise equal to subdue the forest and to develop and bring forth the vast resources that lie hidden here?

… That valley is to [be] the safety valve for our Southern States, when they become over-populated with slaves, the African Slave Trade will be stopped, and they will send their slaves to the Amazon. Just as the Mississippi Valley has been the escape valve for the slaves of the Northern, now free, States, so will the Amazon be to that of the Mississippi.[iv]

To further promote this expansion of slavery Maury resorted to the fear mongering of race war, in De Bow’s Review in an article advocating the transfer of African American slaves to the Amazon.[v]

A columnist in the UDC Magazine in 1958 writing about an article praising Maury, lists this as an example of Maury accomplished intellect. Further the columnist quotes Maury writing to his cousin that transferring African American slaves to the Amazon “…would be relieving our own country of the slaves, it would be hastening the time of our deliverance, and if it would be putting off indefinitely, the horrows [sic] of that war of races, which without an escape is surely to come."[vi]

Despite his iconic status in the South, Robert E. Lee was a racist who worked against African Americans after the Civil War. His attitudes are best described by his son Robert E. Lee Jr. The 1904 book Recollections and Letters of General Lee, written by his son, R.E. Lee, Jr., includes the following remark by General Lee:

I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.

Robert E. Lee wrote the notorious White Sulphur Manifesto to undermine and oppose the Republican Party civil rights policies in the presidential election of 1868. In this letter Lee wrote:

It is true that the people of the South, in common with a large majority of the people of the North and West, are, for obvious reasons, inflexibly opposed to any system of laws that would place the political power of the country in the hands of the negro race. But this opposition springs from no feeling of enmity, but from a deep-seated conviction that, at present, the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power. They would inevitably become the victims of demagogues, who, for selfish purposes, would mislead them to the serious injury of the public.

At the Congressional hearings on Reconstruction Lee expressed support of slavery and believing that Virginia would be better off without African Americans.[vii]


[i] “United Daughters of the Confederacy, South Carolina Division: Golden Anniversary 1896-1946,” no author. Also, Harris, Donna, “Oakley Park: Only Shrine of its Kind,” page 23-24, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 64 No. 6, June/July 2001.
[ii] Gerald Horne, “The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade,” pp. 190-91, New York University Press, New York, 2007.
[iii] Foster, Gaines M., “Ghosts of the Confederacy,” page 16, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.
[iv] Gerald Horne, “The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade,” pp. 113-16, New York University Press, New York, 2007. Maury’s plan is discussed from page 112 to 127.
[v] The fact must be obvious to the far-reaching minds of our statesmen, that unless some means of relief be devised, some channel afforded, by which the South can, when the time comes, get rid of the excess of her slave population, that she will be ultimately found, with regard to this institution, in the predicament of the man with the wolf by the ears—too dangerous to hold on any longer, and equally dangerous to let go.

To our mind, the event is as certain to happen as any event is [sic] which dependents on the contingencies of the future, viz.: that unless means be devised for gradually relieving the slave states from the undue pressure of this class upon them—unless some way be opened by which they may be rid of their surplus black population,—the time will come—it may not be in the next nor in the succeeding generation—but, sooner or later, come it will, and come it must—when the two races will join in the death struggle for the mastery,” from Matthew Fontaine Maury, “Direct Foreign Trade of the South,” De Bow’s Review, Vol. 12 No. 2 Feb. 1852, pp. 147.
[vi] Col. John C. Lawton, “Matthew Fontaine Maury,” UDC Magazine, Vol. 21 No. 3, March 1958, pp. 6-7, 10, 17.
[vii] Robert E. Lee, “Memoranda on the Civil War,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Vol. 36 No. 4, August. 1888, 600-01 for his views on slavery; ---, Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction at the First Session Thirty-Ninth Congress, (Washington: GPO, 1866), 135-36 for his views of ridding Virginia of African Americans.